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# Remedial Accounting 101 (englisch)

At its core, GnuCash is a tool for tracking transactions. A transaction is a record of money being removed from one "account" and placed in another. To take a simple example, say you have two bank accounts - a cheque account (that's checking, for the Americans in the audience . . .), and an investment account, and you transfer $500 from the cheque account to the investment account. GnuCash records that transfer.

"But what about when I buy things, or get paid?" I hear you ask. Well, "accounts" in GnuCash aren't just bank accounts. You can set up Income accounts, expense accounts, asset, liability, share accounts, mutual fund accounts - in fact, there are a total of 11 different account types GnuCash supports. You can (and should) set up a number of different expense accounts for different types of expenditure. So, your paycheck would be a transfer from, say "salary", an income account, to your checking account. Buying fuel with your credit card might be a transfer from "ABC Visa", a credit card account, to "Fuel", an expense account. If you've grasped all that, you're 90% of the way to making best use of GnuCash!

Now, if you're going to keep proper track of your finances, you'll obviously want to create a variety of expense and income accounts for keeping track of various transactions you'll make - in fact, setting up the right set of accounts is the key to making GnuCash work for you. However, if you create many different accounts, it can be a pain to keep track of them all. GnuCash has a way of dealing with this, though. It lets you create a treeof accounts. For instance, you can create a "Utilities" expense account, and then create "Utilities:Power", "Utilities:Gas", and "Utilities:Phone". We term "Utilities" to be the "parent" account, and the three others to be "subaccounts". When you produce reports of your financial data, you can choose whether to display a summary of all "utilities" accounts, or data for each individual account.

Now let's go create some accounts!

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